Tuesday, January 5, 2016

The Endangered Species Act isn’t broken, but is its implementation faltering? by @Defenders of Wildlife

We’ve all heard them. Claims from powerful special interests
and members of Congress blaming federal environmental regulations for a
host of economic maladies. The Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act (ESA), are vilified with alarming regularity.

The latest round of baseless claims about the supposed onerous
economic impacts of the ESA led anti-environmental members of Congress
to propose 88 legislative attacks on
the act in 2015, all designed to block or remove protections for
America’s most imperiled wildlife and undermine the strength and
effectiveness of the act.

If these claims of economic doom and gloom purportedly caused by the
ESA had any foundation in fact, this would be a serious problem
warranting close attention. Fortunately, the adverse economic impacts
attributed to the ESA have no basis in “fact” and we now
have compelling new peer-reviewed data to prove it.

An analysis published in December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences assessed a key provision of the ESA: Section 7 consultations. Section 7 requires all federal agencies to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (the Service), or the National Marine Fisheries Service,
(which was not part of this analysis) to ensure that the actions they
are considering funding, authorizing, or carrying out are not likely to
“jeopardize” a listed species or “destroy or adversely modify”
designated critical habitat. As a practical matter, this means
that proposed projects cannot threaten a species’ survival.

The new analysis found
that since 2008, not one of the over 88,000
projects the Service consulted on was stopped because the Service
concluded it would threaten a species’ survival. Although the Service
did find that two projects would initially jeopardize a species, both
ultimately moved forward because they adopted economically feasible
alternative conservation measures designed to reduce impacts to listed
wildlife. But, while this study shows that claims of the ESA causing
economic devastation are groundless, it also raises new questions about
how effectively federal agencies are implementing Section 7.

The ESA gives the Service broad discretionary conservation authority.
This authority under Section 7 is designed to allow the Service’s
wildlife biologists to use their best professional judgement to evaluate
projects and to identify economically feasible modifications that would
avoid threatening a listed species survival. The
study shows that the Service’s track record of evaluating projects over
the past seven years is at odds with past history of the consultation
process.

For example, during the Reagan and Carter administrations, which are
the only other times these type of data were evaluated, it was more
common for the Service to conclude that proposed federal projects or
actions would threaten a species’ survival. For example, from 1979-1981,
the Service evaluated 10,762 proposed actions and found that 173 would
jeopardize a species. Only two of these projects, however, were
ultimately cancelled or withdrawn. A similar pattern occurred with
consultations from 1987-1991. During that time, the Service completed
73,560 consultations, finding that 350 projects were likely to threaten a
species’ survival. But of those projects, only 18 were blocked or
cancelled because there were no feasible alternatives to the projects.

Even though the Service was making a steady but modest number
of jeopardy calls during these earlier study periods, over 99 percent of
all projects still proceeded with only limited modifications, again
dispelling the myths that the ESA permanently blocks projects and harms
thousands of jobs across the country.

This past history of Section 7 consultations now raises the question
as to why since 2008, the Service found that only two projects could
potentially jeopardize a species compared to the 173 and 350 jeopardy
calls it issued in earlier study periods. This is a dramatic shift in
consultation findings.

Have federal
agencies become that much better at planning projects so as to avoid
jeopardizing imperiled species? Or, is the Service so starved of funding
and staff that it can only give superficial and cursory looks at
proposed projects? A third option: could the Service be discouraging its
Section 7 biologists from issuing jeopardy opinions to avoid
controversial or confrontational disagreements under the ESA? Might the
answer be a mixture of all of the above explanations? We currently don’t know the answer to these questions, but it is essential that an answer be found. We intend to do just that.

These data point to very real questions regarding the present and
future implementation of the Section 7 consultation process and whether
the Service has quit making tough biological calls under Section 7
needed to conserve listed species. Section 7 is a critical component of
the ESA, and if it is not being implemented correctly, the ultimate goal
of the ESA – saving species – could be severely undermined.

The ideal world is where Service biologists feel empowered to call
the jeopardy balls and the strikes as they see them during the
consultation process, and then work closely with affected agencies to
identify feasible pathways forward. This is a world that works best for
listed species, best for the integrity of the ESA and best for our
nation’s economy. It is a world that we all should endorse.

A former head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,
Jamie’s lifelong commitment to wildlife and conservation led her to
choose a career in wildlife biology. Jamie is recognized as a leading
national expert on the Endangered Species Act and imperiled wildlife.
Her leadership and expertise have helped defeat numerous efforts to
destroy the Endangered Species Act.

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone